i'm supremely pleased that it is autumn now but days and days of rain have conspired -- along with 1. the fact that i could not find plain steel wool pads 2. a sad james taylor song on the PA system 3. the fact that apparently reese's has bastardized it's perfectly great old-school peanut butter CUPS for a bunch of other troglodyte candies and our stupid acme-that-time-forgot still somehow ONLY had these NEW items and not a simple, classic, PERFECT peanut butter CUP -- have conspired, i say, to make me cry. in the acme.
perhaps my world is falling apart. nah... but i want a fucking reese's! and i'm sorry but boy's drug bust is still better media for me than... than... franz ferdinand. is this REALLY the best pop music has to offer right now? franz ferdinand? i tried. i really tried. it's not bad. it's not. but it's... it's... it's a reese's "fast break" bar and george, in all his "bloated and pale" redundancy, is still the real peanut butter cup.
in other comparisons, i realized last week that, when eating sushi, when you get a big platter of sushi and it's got those awful clam pieces on the platter? that you just can't eat? clam nigiri is like the tori amos of the sushi world.
isn't it? you know i'm right.
what does any of it have to do with handwork, you ask. oh... not much. i have not much to show, since what i'm working on either doesn't look like anything or is a holiday surprise for someone. and very little of what i'm up to seems to be knitting. maybe a quarter of my total current in-progress workload.
it's definitely one result of the yarn moratorium -- i'm concentrating on other textile pursuits besides knitting. i felt though, recently, that i hadn't necessarily fulfilled the purpose of avoiding the manufactured yarn/primary market since i hadn't purchased very much that i had said i WOULD purchase -- that is, any yarns i could buy or swap in the secondary markets, even manufactured ones -- and of course, handspun, or spinning fibers, could be readily exchanged for money or gifts-in-kind.
i didn't do much of that type of buying, since i am not a stasher, but i have remedied that this morning by purchasing both spinning fiber and handspun. there. one has a purpose, the other yet does not. i bought actual stash! all within the confines of my own little rulebook. it's not that it took me six months to find something worthy. i wasn't looking hard.
in choosing my handspun this morning from an online site, i was rocked by how autumn obviously affects the crafty person in a big, big way. the color combinations in handspun, the leafy motifs on notecards. we love this time of year.
cyril connolly wrote of it in the unquiet grave, which is full of pronouncements that could be emblazoned in neon above my desk every day, and i don't think i'd ever grow to doubt them.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than daffodills. Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion, therefore is April called 'the cruellest month'. Autumn is the mind's true Spring; what is there we have, 'quidquid promiserat annus' and it is more than we expected.
connolly, writing as palinurus, had a lot to say that can be applied both to textile work and writing (while textile references may be analogous, it seems pretty clear that connolly was not pulling punches when writing about literature, and that he had little patience for the jonathan franzens and dave eggerses and jennifer weiners of his world).
To fashion a golden book, to weave a suit that will last some hundred years, it is necessary to feel, to think, and to write....We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent.
Art which is directly produced for the Community can never have the same withdrawn quality as that which is made out of the artist's solitude. For this possesses the integrity and bleak exhilaration that are to be gained only from the absence of an audience and from communion with the primal sources of unconscious life. One cannot serve both beauty and power...
Once we believe that the ego is like a cell which by over-assertion of itself causes cancer, the cancer of developing at the expense of society or at the expense of the self's natural harmony with the order of things, a harmony which it drowns by its own din, then we can only dislike the pushing, confident extroverts who, with their petty ambitions, form the backbone of fiction....
Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.
each of these ideas is as delicious as a "fun size" reese's peanut butter cup, and as perfect (halloween-sized reese's cups are a legitimate variation on the quintessent). connolly's distaste for fiction writers who want to add credits to their writing "resumés" like matrons collecting boxtops from cereal and mac and cheese, believing in the empirical power of these to add up to big big prizes is still timely. and, ugh -- haven't i known too, too many people who "want to write" and yet can't stand the unseemly emotions, confusion, and yes, hopelessly unstylish obsessions which tend to add up to really good writing?
in this rainy weather, one can luxuriate in books like the unquiet grave (particularly when one has finished printing the knitting tarot decks and is taking the slow steps toward layout for the book). it's really the perfect book for fall, and is worth spreading around.
you know those bumper stickers that say stop bitching, start a revolution? i have no clue how that's supposed to work -- shouldn't you continue bitching to further a revolution?